


Vertrauen

by tolstayas



Category: Deutschland 83, Deutschland 86 (TV)
Genre: F/F, hhh lesbiams.....
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-07-16
Packaged: 2020-06-29 14:51:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19832491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tolstayas/pseuds/tolstayas
Summary: They first met in the evening, and Lenora remembers it like a film set to gentle music, like a vision in soft lamplight.A romance in four movements.





	Vertrauen

They first met in the evening, and Lenora remembers it like a film set to gentle music, like a vision in soft lamplight.

A restaurant. It was arranged. They would be working together. Neither of them knew anything about the other; Lenora was told where to sit and wait, and Rose was told where to find her.

“I didn’t know you were a woman,” murmured Rose in German when she arrived, taking her seat cautiously. It was a nice place, an elegant table for two. This wasn’t what work usually looked like, to Rose. It felt a little bit too much like leisure for her comfort.

“I didn’t know you spoke German.”

Rose smiled. “Seithathi,” she said, and held out her hand.

Lenora shook it. “Rauch. Glad to finally meet you, comrade. I’ve heard good things.”

“Likewise.”

They spoke briefly about the mission at hand, but there was not much left to discuss. It had all been arranged already; all that was left was to put it into practice.

Of course Lenora had noticed she was beautiful. Noticing had been her whole career. But it wasn’t until she saw her on the field that she was hit with the full force of it.

***

Lenora could always tell when she was beginning to fall in love: it came inevitably with a wave of overpowering suspicion, closer, she had to admit, to paranoia than to professionalism. So when she began to feel her heart beat faster at the sight of Rose's silhouette across the street, or the sound of her voice over the telephone, it was equal parts terror and tenderness. When Rose spoke in Xhosa she felt her heart seize up with uncertainty. She dug through all the files she could find on her, over and over again. Trust didn't come easily to her; quite the opposite. She needed to know everything. 

She knew all too well that it could be a trick. After all, God knew Rose was her type.

Eventually it became unbearable. One evening, she snuck into Rose’s office, bugged her phone, memorized her handwriting. She had thought about grilling her daughter for information, but found that a little too crude, even for her. She had desperately hoped this security measure would reassure her, but, leaving the office, she felt strangely and deeply unsettled.

Rose noticed the moment she walked into her office that something was off. She searched the room, unscrewed the telephone receiver, removed the bug. Immediately she called Lenora. She didn’t want to alarm her own people yet, not until she knew more about it; oddly, she trusted Lenora enough to turn to her first.

“Yes?”

“If I showed you a bug, do you think you could tell me what country it was made in?”

Lenora didn’t usually hesitate. “Uh. Nine times out of ten, yes.”

“Someone was in my office today.”

Rose couldn’t see Lenora go pale.

“How long did it take you to find it?”

Rose looked at the clock. “Three minutes. More or less.”

“I suppose that makes you the better spy.” Lenora tried to laugh, and bit her lip instead. She rarely felt guilty about things like this, or anything at all, really; this was different, she supposed, because it was personal.

“What?”

There was a long silence.

“Lenora? You did this?”

“I’m sorry,” Lenora breathed, very quietly.

“You don’t trust me.”

“Actually, I was afraid I trusted you a little too much.”

“Oh,” Rose whispered, barely audible.

Lenora’s throat was very dry.

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

They didn’t talk about it until later.

Of course Rose had noticed, even early on, the way Lenora’s gaze sometimes drifted to her lips or her neck and remained fixed there - briefly, but significantly - like a fly caught in a web. Of course, she knew that Lenora was often a little too reluctant to let her leave, a little too insistent that they should work together again some other time. She was a professional, of course she knew what it meant. And it wasn’t that she wasn’t interested, far from it.

But she knew better than to do anything, knew better than to seek out romance under these circumstances. Though it hurt, she understood exactly why Lenora had bugged her office. So she never leaned too close, never stayed too long, never whispered too softly. She was never anything but professional.

And gradually, it put Lenora at ease: any enemy agent tasked with seducing her would surely get on with it by now. And seriousness suited Rose so stunningly. God, she really was her type.

Later, Lenora did manage to bring up the bug in the telephone, if only to ask for forgiveness. And Rose laughed gently, and said she understood, of course she did. That she had already forgiven, and in fact there was nothing to forgive, really. That, if anything, she had been a little bit impressed. Although - she said with the flash of a smile - you could have done a better job of hiding it.

***

Lenora was always sort of jokingly embarrassed about their first kiss. Cliché, two spies high on adrenaline after a mission gone wrong, a narrow escape from death reminding them of the life that burned inside them, throwing caution to the wind. It just wasn’t like her. She wasn’t the type to do that sort of thing; she’d be long dead if she were. But just this once… Just this once, it worked.

They had run separate ways, ducked away for a few hours; Lenora was trembling by the time she returned to her office. A few hours later, there was a knock on the door, and Lenora could have cried.

It was then, when the door opened and she saw her standing there, that Rose realized how much she needed to see Lenora alive, too. It was then that she realized she was in far, far too deep.

“Rose. Oh, thank God.” Instinctively Lenora reached out to embrace her, her hands still hesitant to believe her eyes. Rose didn’t resist. They stood in the doorway in each other’s arms for a long, exquisite moment.

“I really thought you didn’t trust me,” Rose murmured, almost ruefully.

Lenora looked up at her, and another part of her heart shattered, and the shards had been piling up for years now, so what did she have left to lose?

It was a softer kiss than she had expected. She treasured it.

***

“You don’t have any children.”

It isn’t a question; Rose knows, of course, has figured out what category of person Lenora belongs to, how she lives, what she values. It's more of a suggestion, a hint that Rose wants to talk about it, and wonders if Lenora would mind.

“No... I never married. Never settled down. Never, you know, did the usual thing.”

“I can see that.” Rose smiles. “You’re far beyond the usual.”

“You’re not going to ask if I regret it?”

“Only if you want me to.”

Lenora thinks about that for a second, takes a drag from her cigarette. “To anyone else, I would feel like I needed to explain myself. To make excuses, to justify it.”

“I know,” says Rose. “I am a working mother; that isn’t something people do. I am always explaining. Always justifying.”

Lenora nods.

“Sometimes I wish I had just done the usual thing.”

Lenora looks at her then, the intensity in her eyes that of a devout woman looking up at a fresco in stained glass, with the sun shining through. “Don’t say that.”

“It would be easier. Everything.”

“And who would you be?”

“Nobody. Would that be so bad?”

“No. I don’t mean that.” Lenora shakes her head, lets a mouthful of smoke drift from her lips. “I mean… without the cause, without the fight…”

Rose nods. “I could never live, knowing my sisters and brothers are in danger, knowing that I could be part of the solution, and not be a part of it. I would rather be dead. You know me well enough to know that.”

“Yes. That’s what I mean.”

Rose starts to say something, hesitates, almost swallows it, then gives in. “Is it worth it?”

“It’s worth everything. Of course it is.”

Rose smiles a little, ironic smile, as if to say, of course you would say that. But Lenora knows it’s what she wants to hear. She would have asked someone else, otherwise.

“It’s a part of you.”

“I suppose it is, yes.”

They are sitting at a small table with the window open, and the sun is setting outside. Rose looks out to see the clouds go pink. Lenora watches her.

“I love you,” she murmurs.

Rose doesn’t look away from the sunset. “I know,” she whispers back.

“Not just because of the job.” Lenora takes a puff of her cigarette, sighs, leans her head on her hand and observes. She takes in the way the evening light hits Rose’s face, her cheek and the bridge of her nose glossily illuminated, her eyelashes picked delicately out of the glow. “Or anything else. It’s just you. If you were nobody I would love you just as much.”

Rose turns away from the window, then, and looks at Lenora, and smiles, and the sunset is shining in her eyes; and for a second, it all makes sense.


End file.
